Next-Gen CASB Blog

Survey: Access Permissions Are IT Leaders' Biggest Concern

We surveyed nearly 100 CIOs and IT leaders at the Gartner Symposium for our Cloud is the Future report. Among the notable findings was the shift in top concerns and priorities. In previous years, we would have expected Shadow IT to be top of mind as many organizations struggled to deal with the use of unsanctioned apps, but the concerns have shifted. IT leaders are overwhelmingly concerned about access permission related issues - controlling sync/download to unmanaged devices, and external sharing. These concerns are driving the shift to a data-centric approach to security.

I's no surprise that access permissions, specifically access from unmmanaged devices, is the biggest concern for 36% of IT leaders heading into 2016, more than any other security challenge. Access permissions are absolutely critical for organizations that need granular control to ensure compliance and to limit which employees can access particular, often sensitive, files.

A CASB like Bitglass enables organizations to create contextual access control policies, defined by geo, role, device type, and more. This is a key advantage of the shift to a data-centric security security strategy as demand for BYOD increases.

Another major concern is external sharing which goes hand in hand with access control. 21% of survey respondents named this their top security challenge. Public cloud applications like Google Apps, Office 365, and Box make it easier than ever for employees to share files with a single click, but oftentimes, sensitive data is shared outside the organization.

The key to solving this problem is visibility over how employees are sharing corporate data and the ability to limit this sharing. With Bitglass, the enterprise can quarantine a file automatically based on data leakage prevention policies. Bitglass also features deep API integration with these public cloud apps to enable control over external sharing permissions.